imagine 46 floppy disks, but they come in pairs.
when a sperm is made, for each of the 23 pairs, you pick one of the pairs, ending up with 23 floppy disks.
same for the egg.
when the egg is fertilized, you have 46 disks again.
sometimes bytes from two disks trade places, but pretty much all the alleles (bytes) on the disk travels together.